October 13, 2020

What to Do After Publishing a Blog Post

If you're investing in content marketing and SEO you're already playing a long game. You know that it'll take time to see results from SEO. But, a bit of extra traffic before your content starts ranking won't hurt - right?

If your post is genuinely good, targets a specific keyword and your post fulfills the search intent, it should rank given time.

While you might want to invest heavily in content promotion, not everyone has the time to effectively promote content using ads, creating Twitter threads, or sharing it in their favorite social media communicates.

Sometimes, you just want to know that you're doing 'enough' and giving your content the best chance of ranking (quickly).

This guide is aimed at founders and small marketing teams who want to speed up the time it takes for their content to start ranking.

Think of it as a content promotion "MVP".

You can get the benefits of content promotion, but without the same time and financial investment.

These steps will create a foundation that will help you content get noticed by Google to give it the best shot of ranking as soon as possible.

Link to It From Your Existing Blog Post

Time to Complete: 5 Minutes

Adding internal links from your existing content to your new blog post is a simple but effective first step.

Interlinking helps you let Google know that your new page is live and relevant to a particular topic. There are virtually no downsides to effective interlinking.

Add a link to your new page from 3-4 existing pages, and you're set.

Rather than explain the theory, I'll jump straight into the practical steps I use to effectively interlink.

The easiest way to find interlinking opportunities is to use search operators.

Head to Google, and add in a term relevant to your new article. For example, this article is about Content Promotion, so I'll type in "promotion".

interlinking for content promotion

A few opportunities come up. Once I publish this article, I can immediately head to those posts and add a link from the parts where I talk about content promotion.

This ensures your new blog post won't be a standalone silo on your website. It will be seen as a natural part of your website. When people are browsing existing posts, they can click-through and discover your new post.

Submit It to Search Console

Time to Complete: 5 Minutes

This is another extremely quick step. The goal here is to let Google know that your page is live.

It's not essential - usually, Google will pick up that you've published a new blog post anywhere from within a few hours to a few days. That said, I feel like kickstarting the process doesn't hurt and effectively makes your blog post 'live' immediately.

Here's how you do it.

1. Head to Google Search Console.

2. Head to the "URL Performance"

3. Enter your new blog post URL

4. Click "Request Indexing"

Submit to Search Console

Once you click Request Indexing, let the animation load and finish.

Google will then prioritize crawling that page on your site, meaning it'll show up in relevant searches.

This tactic doesn't have a huge upside, as it's just speeding up a process that should happen within a few days anyway. But, you're protecting the downside of your content not ranking.

Submit to Aggregators like Zest

Time to Complete: 15 Minutes

One of my favorite content promotion tips is to submit to content aggregation sites like Zest and Growth Hackers.

Why?

It's simple, drives traffic, and gets people on your website.

Depending on your industry, you may have to find specific sites, or there may not be many out there.

At Contentbulb, we submit to sites including Zest.is, and GrowthHackers.

These are very quick to do, so it's not worth not doing them.

They'll get your content in front of relevant audiences, and start driving traffic to it.

content promotion using aggregators

Other places you can post include:

  • Reddit
  • Facebook Groups
  • Slack communities

In my experience, none of these promotion channels are a silver bullet, but, they will likely all drive some traffic if your content resonates with your audience there.

Let Your Audience Know

Time to Complete: 15 minutes

If you have an existing list of people who have opted into marketing communication (this could be customers, leads, or simply people signed up to receive new content from you), send your new post to them.

You don't need to stick to any arbitrary rules like "send an article every week" or "only send posts that are 2000+ words".

All you need to do is send a simple email with a link to your article. Tell people what your blog post is about, and what they can expect to get from it.

If it sounds interesting, they'll click through and read it

Simple.

Don't Overthink It

A lot of marketers and founders get hung up on content promotion. We all hear so much about the importance of it and we can feel like there's no point in doing it unless you can invest hundreds in ads for every blog post.

It's true - if you have money to spend on ads and other paid promotion strategies you will get more traffic and customers from your content more quickly.

But, the main goal of content marketing is usually to drive long-term organic traffic. In the long-run, the promotion tactics you use will level out.

You don't need millions in funding to create a solid foundation for your content strategy, and following these steps will help you get started.

Need help with your content marketing? Let's talk! Contentbulb helps SaaS companies get more traffic and customers with search-friendly and engaging blog posts.

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